.com
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Aliens vs. Predator offers 40 levels of terrifying futuristic
environments in which you choose to be a Colonial Marine, a
Predator, or an Alien. It's "survival of the fittest" for your
species, as you make your way through responsive game screens
that adjust to your actions. Your environments range from
planetscapes to colonial bases, where one wrong move could turn
you from hunter to prey.
From the Manufacturer
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Prepare for the ultimate deep-space battle inside research
station Pandora -- infested with the deadliest creatures in the
galaxy. Heart-pounding action takes you through a real-time 3-D
world. Danger surrounds you inside the station's dark catacombs
filled with vicious aliens and cunning predators. Take your pick
and play as an alien killing and procreating to protect the hive,
a predator hunting for honor, or a colonist fighting to survive.
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Review
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If you're a typical game player, you already know the story and
concept behind Aliens versus Predator. You've seen the movies,
read the comic books, played with the toys, and maybe even helped
Jesse Ventura become governor of Minnesota. In 1994, Rebellion
software created what is generally considered to be one of the
ill-ed Atari Jaguar's best games and the definitive use of the
license to date, Alien versus Predator. Five years later, the
company has remade the game for the PC, bringing half a decade of
technology and gameplay advancements to bear on its previous
effort, and the result is excellent.
On the surface, Aliens versus Predator is a 3D action shooter of
the old (pre-Half Life) school: Armed with a variety of weapons
you doggedly, repeatedly move from point A to point B, killing
anything in your way, riding on elevators, and flipping lots of
switches. Where the game deviates from the norm, and succeeds
beyond expectations, is in its rendering of three distinct
viewpoints and its effective re-creation of the film series'
unrelieved sense of dread.
Each of the game's three characters - the titular Predator and
Alien, and the hess human Marine - has his own plot, composed
of six levels (five in the case of the Alien). The story portion
of these campaigns, though, is virtually missing; the levels have
little continuity between them, except for a vague sense that you
are traveling from one connected place to another, and equipment
acquired on one level does not carry over to the next. Luckily, a
lack of coherent plot is not as much of a liability for Aliens
versus Predator as it would be for almost any other game, because
the history and motivation of each main character are understood
implicitly, as they are simply part of the pop-culture landscape.
The entire game is essentially a series of set pieces designed to
evoke a mood of anxiety and lurking terror. And this Aliens
versus Predator does very, very well. Emerging from a ed
hallway into total darkness, scattering a few flares around to
discover that you've entered a five-story hangar containing a
huge alien ship, then hearing your motion detector scream to life
as something starts to move in the pitch blackness is an
experience in horror unrivaled in gaming.
The engine that brings this all to life is not exactly state of
the art, but is close enough to more than adequately render the
game's environments. The developers have wisely chosen to focus
their attention on effective lighting: Fluorescents crackle to
life in response to your entering a room, flashing red lights
accompany warning klaxons, and hissing flares bathe dark areas in
an eerie white glow. The corona effects made popular by Unreal
are here in abundance, and if strobing, colored lights are
sometimes overused, they remain true to the Alien films, which
share a similar fascination with mood-heightening,
seizure-inducing lighting schemes. The levels take place, for the
most part, in assorted installations, with occasional
forays into alien hives and the familiar tall canyons that pass
for outdoor scenery in most shooters. More often than not,
though, the locations are interesting and filled with enough
architectural surprises, bric-a-brac from the various films, and
cool extras (like glimpsing spaceships rumbling past windows), to
ensure that the environments remain exciting. The game is
especially successful when rendering derelict Alien spacecraft.
The recreation of H.R. Giger's sleek design is almost flawless,
from the enormous, curved hulls to the overtly erotic entryways.
Where Aliens versus Predator truly breaks new ground is in its
selection of protagonists. The Marine is both the most
immediately familiar and the most fragile. He carries a standard
yet satisfying array of weapons; from the bullet spewing, grenade
launching pulse (taking a cue straight from Aliens, it's
best fired in "short, controlled bursts") to the rocket firing
SADAR to a really well-depicted flamethrower, with several
variations in between. Unlike the heroes of most first-person
shooters, the Marine is relatively mortal. A few solid hits from
an alien, an overlong bath in its blood, or a single
unstopped facehugger, and it's
wrapped-in-plastic-and-ejected-into-space time. This frailty
makes the Marine missions an unusually tense challenge. The
Predator is somewhat more standard shooter fare, and the least
interesting of the three. He's a tank rolling over hordes of
enemies, and while he has the stealth and infravision
capabilities of the movie series (both well rendered), his game,
while enjoyable, is the most traditional.
The Alien, on the other hand, is a completely original
experience. Armed with only a dagger-like tail and claws, it
views the world through a very nifty fisheye perspective
patterned after the POV s in Alien 3. Having no ranged
weapons, it must get right on top of its prey to be effective.
Luckily, the Alien moves like a rocket car, can fall from any
height without taking damage, and climbs fly-like across walls
and ceilings, making navigating levels a dizzying, and at first
disorienting, business somewhat akin to Descent. Once mastered,
the incredible sense of speed and freedom the Alien provides is
exhilarating. Rebellion has taken full advantage of the
surface-clinging play mechanic in its level design. The game's
environments are loaded with twisty passages running off at all
angles, forcing the Alien player to crawl everywhere and making
wall climbing a central strategy rather than the underused
gimmick it could have been.
It must be mentioned that the designers at Rebellion have made a
decision that will be reviled by many PC gamers: True to their
console roots, they've eliminated on-demand, intra-level saving.
You must complete each mission from start to finish without
dying. By wresting control of the save feature from the gamer,
they are able to set the pace of the game and ensure that tension
remains high in a way that simply couldn't be accomplished using
the standard save-anywhere mechanic. Some of the levels are
large, though, and if the idea of replaying them over and over
again is unbearable, you'll want to give Aliens versus Predator a
miss. Having said that, enemy placement is randomized with each
restart. While they generally appear in the same area, their
numbers and entry points change, so redoing a level is not simply
an exercise in rote memorization and remains somewhat fresh even
the nth time through.
Aliens versus Predator includes all the standard multiplayer
options, plus several unique variations. The game advertises
co-op play, but, rather than being the hoped-for cooperative romp
through the single-player levels, it's actually a bastardized
form of deathmatch, with the computer controlling wave after wave
of kamikaze Aliens. The whole endeavor is rather pointless and
quickly becomes tiresome. The designers have inexplicably
eschewed the current trend of including a built-in Internet game
finder, and have tragically relied on the baroque contraption
that is Mplayer for match-ups. The best that can be said for this
choice is that it affords the player plenty of time to spend in
the Mplayer lobby discovering the many different ways to misspell
"predator." The game also supports specific IP connections and, a
feature missing from many modern action games, direct modem
hookups. Once set up, the multiplayer game is both stable and
relatively diverting. You won't be throwing out Starsiege: Tribes
or the Quake 3: Arena demo just yet, but, as an addition to the
package, it's a fun bonus, though locating a game can be
unreasonably arduous.
Aliens versus Predator takes the traditional first-person
shooter and, instead of attempting to advance the art of
interactive storytelling, simply augments the form with new
effects and features that affect gameplay in deep, satisfying
ways. With its single-minded focus on terrifying the player, the
game is something of a one-trick pony. But that one trick is more
than adequate to carry an entire game. -- Erik Wolpaw
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot
logo are trademarks of GameSpot Inc. -- GameSpot Review
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